NeXT
Veteran Member
First off, this is 100% unrelated to this forum or any other computer forum you might see me on. This is more a debate I just want to measure what others think because if I directly pressed this on the community I'm going to refer to without a name, it would very swiftly be dealt with.
While I'm sure the moderators of vcfed can agree I can be a pain in the butt at times, you are all considerably nicer than many of our alternatives.
We know that forums can have life cycles. They start up, they have their run of popularity and as users age, mature or the core reason the forum exists becomes redundant or obsolete it dies off before being shutdown entirely. Some forums however remain perpetual. As long as there will be computers, the context of "vintage" will always be in the air. There will always be cult classics in film and television. Car enthusiasts will likewise exist long after we are all dead. You get the idea.
This particular community grew up around interests and television inspiration. A fan site. The first iteration of the forum appeared as far back as 2005 and I entered into the scene as far back as 2007. At that point there multiple fan sites operating on multiple platforms such as Yahoo! groups and Geocities running on whatever flavor of forum software was hip at the time, usually vBulletin. I was a moderator on one of them. There's the people who show up and communicate and there's the power-users who you see across multiple forums, usually making a dozen or so posts on each daily. Time drags on, Geocities shuts down, Yahoo! boards become increasingly unpopular compared to more traditional forums here in the West and you see some of the smaller fansites close and the userbases migrate to one or two larger forums. Smaller webspaces which mostly contain pages of information, images, notes and side-groups merge and become hard-linked to by one major site which starts acting as a hub to the forums, resources and news. Finally in 2012 in the transition from HTTP to HTTPS everything merges into a single server hosting all the pages and a new forum. All the while these constantly active users you've seen posting for the last five years are making their way up the ranks from regular user, to super user to moderator and finally to the site administration team. You know these people from outside the community (be it games or IRC chats or something) and you know that as they spent increasingly larger amounts of time on one site or another they develop a bit of a superiority complex. You start to see really weird decisions get made that exit the control of other senior users.
For example I find a video that provides a great behind-the-scenes on something and post it. It's deleted. No externally hosted videos are allowed to be posted for copyright reasons. Well, okay but you don't provide a means internally to host videos. Eventually youtube videos are allowed to be posted but they must strictly be on-topic and free of copyrighted material and you probably ask why the moderation team wishes to manage that when Youtube is capable of doing that itself. You begin to notice trends. Videos being one example but if you aren't regularly in the forum you are missing a lot. You can enter into a thread that started that morning and has 11 posts, then return four hours later and now it only has 8 and the photos from another have been removed. You work on your own personal projects and propose ideas on how others can make it as well and get grilled because you are making unofficial, possibly counterfeit merchandise. I mean, it's a fan site. When you get older are you going to grill your kids for drawings they put on the fridge because they are not officially endorsed?
Incidentally around the same time, the popularity of the site has finally attracted the attention of the subject's official proprietor and agree to become the "unofficial" english-speaking source of news, gossip and sneak-peeks on new things coming up and internationally. At the same time the proprietor never directs anyone at the community site, rather instead towards their own official news feeds. At that point there you begin to see a serious shift of the moderation. To your knowledge the forums and the entire site is funded by donations and those maintaining the order still have full-time jobs to pay the rent, yet you find that everything now falls under the microscope. Sure, the on-topic areas remain as such but with razor-sharp moderation. You do anything outside of the context of the discussion and you see your post vanish or the little "[Moderator edited]" tag and that post can no longer be edited. But it goes beyond that. It starts creeping into the more casual and more off-topic areas. It feels a lot more like anything that you post must be approved before it goes anywhere near the name of the proprietor, even if it's in the lounge and we are still talking about an unofficial fansite. We're not talking politics. We're not talking personal life issues. Even just discussing a vacation or a public meetup gets heavily redacted. A few weeks after COVID became the big news topic everywhere I carefully evaluated the room and made a soft "So we're all stuck at home and this virus is everywhere. How are you passing the time? lmao" type of thread. Deleted. The topic was determined by the moderation team was too distressing and in future I was asked not to make threads like this again unless I reviewed it with a moderator. Without actually starting said discussion the thread appeared in verbatim several days later, posted by the same moderator. So I wasn't allowed to make a thread like that, but they were.
Lastly was the one that bothered me enough to stop being a regular contributor to this community which was when I got the impression it wasn't just the forums being screened but your PM's as well. That's not a new thing and forums do routinely screen automatically for malicious activities within PM's but when it's something like trying to discuss trades and exchanges in PM's and between that you get notifications by email of a PM and that PM disappears from your inbox before you can reach it that you get concerned this is not automated filtering but people are manually looking at your mail. Normally when that happened you could still see the bulk of the message in the email because it was previewed in that, but eventually that was disabled so you'd get notifications of PM's, you'd go look and there was nothing. You report it to administration and they'd just say "PM's are actively screened for unacceptable behavior. Repeated violations will have you removed from the forum."
Okay, sure I can see where they are going with that but when it's something as simple as "hey I saw you mentioned you backed [X's] site up before he died can you send me a copy because it's not on Wayback?" and you're getting told from above that you illegally sharing files (???) is prohibited and the message was deleted, like get the hell out of my inbox. You can't post it publicly. You can't post it privately. You tell people to email you off-site (in PM's!) and they put you in the corner for a week.
Fine, so the site has either become a mouthpiece for the owner of the IP much like you see with official community forums like you see from EA for example and are making sure absolutely nothing happens while its under their ownership to the point it's excessively sterile, or the same kids you saw posting daily all those years back have grown up and became absolute control freaks to a point it's scary. So go so a side-community where it's better. Go to a different Discord server. What happens if you start looking around and they are everywhere? They organize events. They moderate subreddits. They operate all of the active discord servers and you start to wonder if this IS their paying full-time job. You piss them off in one place and they almost exclusively have the ability to boot you out of the entire community from any direction because they and only they do not like you? I can't easily say it's the toxicity of a whole community when it's a group of people you can count with one hand who essentially dictate everything below the tier of the official organization, their employees and their legal team but what do you when regardless how new or senior you are to a community you can't defend other users and your contributions can't be seen? I know there are other good people in this community that I can socialize with but we have to do it privately, fearing the wrath of them. That's not a community at that point.
While I'm sure the moderators of vcfed can agree I can be a pain in the butt at times, you are all considerably nicer than many of our alternatives.
We know that forums can have life cycles. They start up, they have their run of popularity and as users age, mature or the core reason the forum exists becomes redundant or obsolete it dies off before being shutdown entirely. Some forums however remain perpetual. As long as there will be computers, the context of "vintage" will always be in the air. There will always be cult classics in film and television. Car enthusiasts will likewise exist long after we are all dead. You get the idea.
This particular community grew up around interests and television inspiration. A fan site. The first iteration of the forum appeared as far back as 2005 and I entered into the scene as far back as 2007. At that point there multiple fan sites operating on multiple platforms such as Yahoo! groups and Geocities running on whatever flavor of forum software was hip at the time, usually vBulletin. I was a moderator on one of them. There's the people who show up and communicate and there's the power-users who you see across multiple forums, usually making a dozen or so posts on each daily. Time drags on, Geocities shuts down, Yahoo! boards become increasingly unpopular compared to more traditional forums here in the West and you see some of the smaller fansites close and the userbases migrate to one or two larger forums. Smaller webspaces which mostly contain pages of information, images, notes and side-groups merge and become hard-linked to by one major site which starts acting as a hub to the forums, resources and news. Finally in 2012 in the transition from HTTP to HTTPS everything merges into a single server hosting all the pages and a new forum. All the while these constantly active users you've seen posting for the last five years are making their way up the ranks from regular user, to super user to moderator and finally to the site administration team. You know these people from outside the community (be it games or IRC chats or something) and you know that as they spent increasingly larger amounts of time on one site or another they develop a bit of a superiority complex. You start to see really weird decisions get made that exit the control of other senior users.
For example I find a video that provides a great behind-the-scenes on something and post it. It's deleted. No externally hosted videos are allowed to be posted for copyright reasons. Well, okay but you don't provide a means internally to host videos. Eventually youtube videos are allowed to be posted but they must strictly be on-topic and free of copyrighted material and you probably ask why the moderation team wishes to manage that when Youtube is capable of doing that itself. You begin to notice trends. Videos being one example but if you aren't regularly in the forum you are missing a lot. You can enter into a thread that started that morning and has 11 posts, then return four hours later and now it only has 8 and the photos from another have been removed. You work on your own personal projects and propose ideas on how others can make it as well and get grilled because you are making unofficial, possibly counterfeit merchandise. I mean, it's a fan site. When you get older are you going to grill your kids for drawings they put on the fridge because they are not officially endorsed?
Incidentally around the same time, the popularity of the site has finally attracted the attention of the subject's official proprietor and agree to become the "unofficial" english-speaking source of news, gossip and sneak-peeks on new things coming up and internationally. At the same time the proprietor never directs anyone at the community site, rather instead towards their own official news feeds. At that point there you begin to see a serious shift of the moderation. To your knowledge the forums and the entire site is funded by donations and those maintaining the order still have full-time jobs to pay the rent, yet you find that everything now falls under the microscope. Sure, the on-topic areas remain as such but with razor-sharp moderation. You do anything outside of the context of the discussion and you see your post vanish or the little "[Moderator edited]" tag and that post can no longer be edited. But it goes beyond that. It starts creeping into the more casual and more off-topic areas. It feels a lot more like anything that you post must be approved before it goes anywhere near the name of the proprietor, even if it's in the lounge and we are still talking about an unofficial fansite. We're not talking politics. We're not talking personal life issues. Even just discussing a vacation or a public meetup gets heavily redacted. A few weeks after COVID became the big news topic everywhere I carefully evaluated the room and made a soft "So we're all stuck at home and this virus is everywhere. How are you passing the time? lmao" type of thread. Deleted. The topic was determined by the moderation team was too distressing and in future I was asked not to make threads like this again unless I reviewed it with a moderator. Without actually starting said discussion the thread appeared in verbatim several days later, posted by the same moderator. So I wasn't allowed to make a thread like that, but they were.
Lastly was the one that bothered me enough to stop being a regular contributor to this community which was when I got the impression it wasn't just the forums being screened but your PM's as well. That's not a new thing and forums do routinely screen automatically for malicious activities within PM's but when it's something like trying to discuss trades and exchanges in PM's and between that you get notifications by email of a PM and that PM disappears from your inbox before you can reach it that you get concerned this is not automated filtering but people are manually looking at your mail. Normally when that happened you could still see the bulk of the message in the email because it was previewed in that, but eventually that was disabled so you'd get notifications of PM's, you'd go look and there was nothing. You report it to administration and they'd just say "PM's are actively screened for unacceptable behavior. Repeated violations will have you removed from the forum."
Okay, sure I can see where they are going with that but when it's something as simple as "hey I saw you mentioned you backed [X's] site up before he died can you send me a copy because it's not on Wayback?" and you're getting told from above that you illegally sharing files (???) is prohibited and the message was deleted, like get the hell out of my inbox. You can't post it publicly. You can't post it privately. You tell people to email you off-site (in PM's!) and they put you in the corner for a week.
Fine, so the site has either become a mouthpiece for the owner of the IP much like you see with official community forums like you see from EA for example and are making sure absolutely nothing happens while its under their ownership to the point it's excessively sterile, or the same kids you saw posting daily all those years back have grown up and became absolute control freaks to a point it's scary. So go so a side-community where it's better. Go to a different Discord server. What happens if you start looking around and they are everywhere? They organize events. They moderate subreddits. They operate all of the active discord servers and you start to wonder if this IS their paying full-time job. You piss them off in one place and they almost exclusively have the ability to boot you out of the entire community from any direction because they and only they do not like you? I can't easily say it's the toxicity of a whole community when it's a group of people you can count with one hand who essentially dictate everything below the tier of the official organization, their employees and their legal team but what do you when regardless how new or senior you are to a community you can't defend other users and your contributions can't be seen? I know there are other good people in this community that I can socialize with but we have to do it privately, fearing the wrath of them. That's not a community at that point.